Britain’s rotten unions will kill Labour

By Pete North - May 31, 2021

A lot has been said on this website about the state of the modern Labour Party. It has many intractable dilemmas serving as a barrier to its re-election and short of becoming a wholly different party with different politics, different leaders and different members, one doesn’t see a Labour government this side of 2030, if ever again.

Part of that problem though, as Nick Cohen observes, are the Labour backing unions who seem far too wrapped up in their own petty little squabbles to do anything at all for actual workers. They have money and considerable power but wield it only in their own interests. This is a subject on which Cohen could have gone to town, but to fully explore the issue he would have to admit that the left is absolutely dead.

This was evident over the weekend as we saw yet another mass demonstration against masks and lockdowns and, to a point, the vaccine. Lockdowns and Covid precautions have cause untold damage to the hospitality industry and many others and yet the unions were nowhere to be seen. It has now become a measure of authenticity. You can tell it’s an authentic working class protest by the absence of Unison or Socialist Worker placards. The unions, like Labour, steal the clothes of a working class movement, and wave their union banners and communist flags at irrelevant protests, but they’re about as authentic working class as Jacob Rees-Mogg.

In this respect the unions have much the same problem as Labour. Over the last thirty years or so we have effectively abolished the white working class in the UK and replaced them with cheap foreign labour. Non-unionised Illegal immigrants (those most likely to need protection from exploitation) are now working in the sweatshops and warehouses, picking fruits and shellfish and cleaning our hospitals.

Regular readers will know I’m not quite sold on the classic diagnosis that Labour has abandoned the working class. The traditional Labour voting working class are now retired boomers who are doing pretty well. The did-quite-well-out-of-thatchers. Thus when Labour picks up on traditional working class complaints, it is to a very large extent, dealing with issues which mainly affect immigrants. Along with its cultivation of the Muslim vote Labour appears to represent virtually anyone but white British people.

For Labour and the unions to argue for better conditions it has to argue for regularisation of illegals already here (which is not terribly popular) but it could offset that by demanding better border control in order to cut off the supply of fresh meat for the neoliberal grinder. But it will never do the latter, thus presents to the electorate as the friend of the Islamist and the illegal immigrant, while detesting the very people they pretend to represent.

And it is a pretence. When we see protests adorned with communist flags and Socialist Worker placards, they tend to be middle class youth protests because they’re cosplaying a pastiche of the working class. They wave their union banners and red flags as stage props because that’s what they imagine real working class people would do. They’re closer to a battle re-enactment society than a union movement – and it comes as no surprise whatsoever that Owen Jones puts himself at the centre of it.

This goes some way to explaining their fetishisation of the NHS as another figleaf of authenticity. But then as much as the NHS is a mass employer of immigrants, it is also the backstop for union fee paying middle class managers and administrators. It is the last stronghold of a dead movement. Not for nothing has that arm of the public sector been captured by the woke agenda. It is a profoundly middle class set of ideas to advance middle class power. If a genuine workers movement did start to break through into mainstream public life, the British left would denounce it as “far right”.

In most respects the unions are now useless. They have very little to say about trade deals opening up our markets to foreign competition that uses cheaper labour and modern slavery. Since most trade politics was conducted in Brussels, most of them have downgraded their in-house trade expertise and only the TUC engages with the subject on a serious level. The rest have nothing to offer but boilerplate bleating about NHS privatisation and chlorinated chicken. Recycled talking points from the TTIP debate years ago.

Eventually the left will get around to wailing about alarm at arbitration mechanisms and investor dispute processes in FTAs, all happening without parliamentary oversight and behind closed doors. As it happens, I have a great deal of sympathy with this point of view, but it’s hard to swallow from remain leaning unions who never had a problem with the behind closed doors dealings of the Commission and its opaque relationship with lobbyists on EU trade and legislative matters – which were a direct threat to democracy and worker’s rights.

Remainers always bleated about worker’s rights, but without a union movement with teeth and vitality, those rights aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Only workers can fight for and sustain decent Labour rights. Brussels wasn’t going to do it and our unions weren’t either.

When it comes down to it, only thirteen percent of the private sector is unionised largely because they have little to offer them. Their “common room wokeness” is wholly irrelevant to the lives of people trying to make their way in life while it means everything to public sector back office workers whose main preoccupation is looking for reasons to be exempt from doing a day’s work and still get paid the same. Public sector unionisation is rising while private sector membership is collapsing.

With union bosses now gorging themselves in the trough, embroiled in grubby scandals and vendettas, slow on the uptake when it matters, and preoccupied with the intra-left civil war, it is yet another arm of the left that may be too rotten to save and requires amputation.

It’s not exactly news that unions are the political wing of self-interested blobs, but increasingly it’s the voice of the well-to-do, remain voting public sectoroids and remnants of the old dinosaur left, still obsessed with Thatcher, who have yet to work out that the modern Labour party threw them overboard years ago. For as the Labour party’s fortunes are in part controlled by these same parasitic husks, it will struggle to break from the politics that keeps it out of office.